That avarice was
one of Seneca's temptations is too probable; that expediency was a
guiding principle of his conduct is but too evident; and for a man with
such a character to rebut an innuendo is never an easy task. Nay more,
it was _after_ this foul event, at the close of Nero's first year, that
Seneca addressed him in the extravagant and glowing language of his
treatise on Clemency. "The quality of mercy," and the duty of princes to
practise it, has never been more eloquently extolled; but it is
accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it something painfully
grotesque as addressed by a philosopher to one whom he knew to have been
guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide. Imagine some Jewish
Pharisee,--a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel--pronouncing an eulogy on the
tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which
Seneca's consistency must have worn in the eyes of his contemporaries.
This event took place A.D. 55, in the first year of Nero's
_Quinquennium_, and the same year was nearly signalized by the death of
his mother. A charge of pretended conspiracy was invented against her,
and it is probable that but for the intervention of Burrus, who with
Seneca was appointed to examine into the charge, she would have fallen a
very sudden victim to the cowardly credulity and growing hatred of her
son.
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